I was fired once, and there were no PIPs, no documentation, no warning, no nothing. Just "We aren't doing this work anymore and don't need you" and that was that.
And if that employee can show that other people were allowed to wear green shirts without being fired, they can use that to support an illegal discrimination claim against the company.
The reason it takes effort and documentation to fire people is because companies want to have a uniform set of rules that are applied equally to all employees. They also want documentation to support the firing. Having a consistent process, applied equally and with supporting documentation discourages people from even trying to bring frivolous lawsuits.
Having additional process is also a check on managers. Some managers try to fire anyone they disagree with, dislike, or even to do things like open headcount so they can fill it with a nepotism hire. Putting process in place and requiring documentation discourages managers from firing people frivolously and adds another level of checks and balances to discourage gaming the system.
That's not at all true.
> If you get fired, and didn't see it coming, that's a failure in management. You should have _plenty_ of explicit signs of where things are heading, starting in 1:1 and culminating in a PIP.
The thing is, everyone is judged by how much inefficiency they remove. This implies that for anyone to be successful, there needs to be inefficiency in the first place. This means that everyone has incentive to create inefficiency, which can be removed at a later time.
Imagine you have ten workers. They say "if we do ten things then the system will be much cheaper to run, but further improvements will be minimal". The most efficient thing to do would be to tell them to work on all things ASAP in parallel, but this means that you'll deliver a lot in the first year, and then very little later on. This makes you look bad as a manager. A much better approach is to artificially delay the tasks and force them to be sequential, one task a year. This means that from outside perspective, your team seems to be consistently delivering added value through entire ten years.
Moreover, imagine that you value all ten employees, but one day the upper management tells every team to fire at least two workers. At that point you'll wish you had two extra guys sitting and doing nothing because you'd be able to fire them without putting your own deliverables in danger.
Not to mention that as a manager, your prestige is proportional to the number of people below you. This means that you have incentive to create bloated teams that sit and do nothing, because having five good and five bad employees looks better on paper than just having five good employees.
In most companies, information flow is extremely opaque. If you're particularly unlucky then your direct supervisor might know your performance is bad, but other than that, zero chance of anyone noticing. And even your direct supervisor might either be too busy, lack knowledge, or simply not give a fuck, because he understands the business value of artificial inefficiency.
This has been my experience at two different companies in multiple cases with egregious underperformance. I suppose if an employee assaulted/harassed someone or was doing something else outright illegal like theft or embezzlement, they would be shown the door immediately. But if someone is half-assing their work and dragging the team down, everyone has to put up with it for months as they get second chances, micromanagement, and other special attention before they can actually be let go.
I think it's due to the litigiousness of the US culture. Yes, US companies can fire people at will, but they can also file lawsuits at will, which are costly (time+money) no matter the outcome.